LESLIE BLODGETT’S color-splashed corner office on the 23rd floor overlooks the financial district, the cement-beige Ferry Building at the rim of the Embarcadero and, in the distance, the sullen grays of San Francisco Bay. The soaring panorama befits the high priestess of Bare Escentuals, a line of chemical-free mineral powders that have revolutionized the way millions of American women — particularly those under 40 — think about makeup.

Ms. Blodgett, a familiar face on QVC, has been compared to Max Factor, whose invention of pancake foundation swabbed on with a wet sponge in the 1930s transformed the cosmetics industry. Wander along the vanity aisle of any drugstore and Ms. Blodgett’s influence is apparent, as giants like Revlon and L’Oréal have been compelled to come out with their own mineral lines.

In her funky brown Gucci mules, straight Gap jeans, dappled-green scarf and blue jacket from Anthropologie, Ms. Blodgett, 48, hardly exuded the regal calm of an industry leader — or even the Zen-centeredness of her adopted Bay Area home. “I don’t veg-out or chill,” she said, wriggling in her seat like a child. At work, she is known for crazy marketing schemes and wackiness — she did the splits onstage at the beginning of an all-company meeting in April, and led a group dance to Rihanna’s “Only Girl (In the World)” — not laid-back cool.

And perfectly groomed, creamy-smooth sentences are too much to ask. “I have trouble just talking,” Ms. Blodgett said, with her slight, but oddly beguiling, speech impediment. “My vocabulary isn’t large. I just keep saying ‘amazing’ and ‘awesome.’ ”

But let’s zero in on the hands, the way the QVC camera does when she peddles the miracle minerals. Her manicure: short nails, clear polish. Her fingers: agile. The ring: an epic diamond surrounded by sapphires and emeralds, which, as Ms. Blodgett’s social media followers know (it is the other way she communicates) was an early 20th anniversary present from Keith, her stay-at-home husband, and picked out at Tiffany’s in New York in October. “Actually, we went into the store just to replace my wedding ring,” he said in a phone interview, “but Leslie came out with that.”

On QVC, Ms. Blodgett’s appearances have the trance-inducing sensuality of a Dionysian ritual, as she applies foundation to a bare-faced woman. In the Bare Escentuals world, this is called a “make under.” The minerals are light, almost translucent, and it is sometimes hard to know what, if anything, they are doing.

Ms. Blodgett’s fingers grasp a small jar and twist off its black lid. A special brush appears (53 varieties are shown on the company’s Web site) and soft bristles are swirled in minerals, which have now vanished from sight.

Swirl. Tap. Tap-tap. The brush is tapped on the edge of the lid. A trace of mineral smoke rises.

What comes next, like all things cosmetically radical, seems strange and scary and potentially the answer to your skin-care prayers. Ms. Blodgett gently sweeps the brush across the woman’s face. In Bare Escentuals terminology, this is known as “buffing.”

Not since Estée Lauder dabbed Youth-Dew behind the ears of thousands has a lone woman so influenced the beauty industry.

Last summer, in Lady Gaga’s tour bus, Ms. Blodgett rolled across the East Coast on a 10-city tour, buffing initiates and meeting thousands of fans and self-described “BE addicts” who tape Ms. Blodgett’s infomercials and confess on social networking sites that they are facing financial ruin from compulsive brush collecting. Women come with tearful testimonials (the product was originally marketed to those with rosacea and acne scars), and they are hungry for more tips.

Nothing is obvious, or easy, when transitioning to minerals. The conversion process is just that, a process.

“You have to explain this product almost the way you have to explain a person,” Ms. Blodgett said. “I am not good at selling, really. I am just an explainer, an educator.” She added: “It even took my mother a couple years to try it. I wasn’t going to force it on her.”

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A Bare Escentuals display.Credit
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Ms. Blodgett’s mother comes up a lot. She is like an off-camera guest presence on QVC. Ms. Blodgett’s father, who died 11 years ago, was a science teacher with his own community television science show for children, and would seem to be the inspiration behind her own success on TV. But Ms. Blodgett said it was her mother, Sylvia Abualy — a 1970s feminist and home-economics teacher on Long Island at Smithtown High School West (which Ms. Blodgett attended) — who nagged her to success.

Ms. Abualy was a prototypical Tiger Mom, but of the Hungarian-Italian variety. “She pushed me, she gave me drive,” said Ms. Blodgett, waving an old letter that she had brought to read. “I love her, and she was an amazing mother,” adding “But if she wasn’t such a bitch, I wouldn’t be what I am today.”

“Leslie was an easy middle child,” said Ms. Abualy, sounding almost docile. Retired from teaching, she is now a photographer in Santa Barbara, Calif. “She was always able to set goals for herself. In seventh grade, Leslie announced that in two years she was going to go to the ninth-grade dance with the best-looking boy in the class. She thought he was really cute. And darned if she didn’t.”

Their mother-daughter problems came later, when Ms. Blodgett chose to study modern dance at the State University at Oswego, N.Y. (“I wasn’t too happy about that,” Ms. Abualy said) and dropped out after two years. In 1981, she was living in Plantation, Fla., and working as a waitress at a Ponderosa Steakhouse when her mother persisted that she apply to a cosmetic marketing program at Fashion Institute of Technology taught by Hazel Bishop, the inventor of a smudge-proof lipstick.

Ms. Blodgett unfolded the letter she received from her mother at that time.

Dear Leslie,

Consider what you will do if FIT doesn’t work out for next fall. Do you have an alternative plan? You’d better think about it or you’ll be working as a waitress all your life. How does that sound?

That’s all for now.

Love,

Mom

Ms. Blodgett was already a seasoned cosmetic industry executive (and wearing pancake) when she stumbled onto the minerals in a road-to-Damascus way in 1994. Her résumé was a groaning pile of brand names. She had spritzed Estée Lauder fragrances while studying at FIT, and worked the Ultima II counter at Macy’s Herald Square wearing as many as eight shades of eye shadow at once. (“The 1980s were all about color,” she said.) An internship at Revlon led to product development at Max Factor, where she worked on colorless mascara.

“I loved creative marketing,” Ms. Blodgett said, “product development, and I was a color expert — on shades and skin tone and blending.”

When Procter & Gamble bought Revlon in 1991, she and Mr. Blodgett, who was producing corporate films and commercials when they married, relocated to Baltimore, where their son Trent was born. (“That’s when my career really died,” Mr. Blodgett said.) Unhappy in Maryland, Ms. Blodgett took a job with Neutrogena in Los Angeles before a friend of a friend called, offering her a chance to rescue a failing business in the Bay Area, a string of natural body care and aromatherapy boutiques with the forgettable name Bare Escentuals.

Ms. Blodgett was busy repackaging the body products when she turned her attention to the “mineral” makeup sold in the boutiques.

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It was finely ground powder, the consistency of confectioner’s sugar, dry but weirdly creamy. “I knew it was remarkable right away,” she said. “But I could see it would be complicated to sell. There was a huge learning curve.”

Made with only five natural ingredients, it was far less likely to cause skin irritations or breakouts, and didn’t contain the questionable chemicals commonly found in most makeup. “Here we are,” she said, “spending time growing organic vegetables or going to the farmers’ market, but otherwise exposing ourselves to all kinds of bad stuff.”

Ms. Blodgett fiddled with the formula, tweaked the colors and settled on four hues. (There are 40 now.) She named the makeup line bareMinerals. “It wasn’t a Cinderella story,” she said. “It wasn’t overnight.” An expensive New York debut in 1995 generated only one article, in W. Sales were so bad that Ms. Blodgett began shuttering boutiques.

But the hours she clocked as a desperate insomniac paid off. In the middle of the night, she watched QVC and thought, “I could do that.” A year after she approached the shopping channel, she went on wearing a white suit and a fake $29 five-carat diamond. The minerals were natural, but the hippie thing had limited appeal.

“I would never have tried the stuff if it weren’t part of my job,” said Lisa Robertson, a former Miss Tennessee and Loretta Young lookalike who is Ms. Blodgett’s on-air partner on QVC. “I wore full-on hard-core liquid foundation, like everybody else, my whole life. I thought: ‘Minerals? What? Don’t even go there.’ The first time I tried it, I didn’t think it was working. I wondered, Emperor’s New Clothes?”

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Credit
Kim White/Bloomberg

Much has been made of the success that followed. Ms. Blodgett’s first appearance wiped out her supply. In her second appearance, she sold $180,000 of foundation in 10 minutes. Before long, she was selling $1.4 million an hour.

QVC notified her that she was being talked about all over their message boards. “We knew we really had something,” said Ms. Blodgett, who logged onto the forum and wrote to customers directly.

Women who were confused or disappointed got even more attention. “After we’d do a show, she would stay up late, for hours on the computer,” Ms. Robertson said. “Before Facebook or MySpace, she was doing social media. It was pretty intense.”

Detractors may wonder what the big deal is, but they cannot deny the revolution Ms. Blodgett created, the multibillion-dollar industry, or the generation of women who, having grown up with loose powder, are not likely to switch to pancake or liquid any time soon. The copycatting has been amazing.

“Bound to happen,” Ms. Blodgett said with a shrug. “When everyone I knew — my family, my brother — started sending me links to every new mineral line, and there were hundreds, ‘Hey, did you see this,’ that’s when it got irritating.”

Nobody but Bare Escentuals has Ms. Blodgett, who sometimes seems more popular than her products. Last year, when the company was acquired for $1.7 billion by Shiseido, one of the largest takeovers in cosmetic industry history, one of the conditions was that Ms. Blodgett continue, not just as “chairman,” as she calls herself, but actively involved as the face of the brand.

But as the minerals head to Asia and Brazil, as planned, and Bare Escentuals expands into skin care (made with something called Active Soil, which seems meant to trigger jokes about washing your face with dirt), how do you sell a character like Ms. Blodgett?

“Leslie can’t be everywhere, and all over the world,” said Simon Cowell, who is in charge of global marketing and communications (and not the singing judge). “So how do we work it? We want to infuse Leslie’s spirit into the brand, her sense of humor, and make the brand even more approachable.”

Recently on QVC, Ms. Blodgett appeared in white pants and a tropical-print tunic for a selling blitz of Faux Tan, her sunless tanning minerals. Lying on a white shag carpet, she and Ms. Robertson applied bronzing powder to a model’s bare legs. Application, as usual, required a specialty brush so big it looked like something you would groom a horse with, or wax a car.

“No snakeskin, no streaking!” Ms. Robertson called out from the rug. “Never wears weird!”

Swirling, tap-tapping, and the rhythmic buffing of the model’s legs continued until Ms. Blodgett and Ms. Robertson looked like participants in a soft-core brush-porn fantasy. After five minutes, more than 1,200 kits of Faux Tan had been sold.

Whether or not Ms. Lauder had a private lavatory tucked next to her wallpapered office overlooking Central Park, Ms. Blodgett has no such luxury. At the Bare Escentuals headquarters, she walks along a narrow hallway to use a three-stall bathroom she shares with the other women on the 23rd floor. “This is where I get my socializing done,” she said with a laugh, “while I wait in line.”

Ms. Lauder hung photographs of royals on the walls of her reliquary: Prince Charles, the Duchess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco. They kept memories of a modest childhood in Queens at bay. Ms. Blodgett’s walls are covered with hundreds of letters and photos of appreciative fans, adoring customers, friends and followers — probably to keep memories of a badgering mom at bay.

“Until I was 39, I was driven to please her,” Ms. Blodgett said. “And I guess I’m still trying to win her approval, in a way.” There is more to worry about these days.

“I have an image in my head of the people who use Bare Escentuals,” she said, when asked how it feels to have started something so huge.

“I literally know them. I know their personalities. What they look like. What they sound like. Where they live. I know them, and inside my head, they are talking to me all day long and I’ve got a lot of work to do to make them happy. That’s how it feels.”